We report our use of quasielastic light scattering to characterize concentration fluctuations in aqueous solutions of gII-crystallin along the critical isochore. We find that the wave number and temperature dependence of the average rate of decay of the concentration fluctuations are consistent with the theory for critical dynamics in binary liquid mixtures only if we allow both the background ...

We discuss the theory of non-critical strings with extrinsic curvature embedded in a target spac d greater than one. We emphasize the analogy between 2d gravity coupled to matter and non liquid-like membranes with bending rigidity. We rst outline the exact solution for strings in dime via the double scaling limit of matrix models and then discuss the diiculties of an extension to d > from recen...

A quantity exists by which one can identify the approach of a dynamical system to the state of criticality, which is hard to identify otherwise. This quantity is the variance κ(1)(≡<χ(2)> - <χ>(2)) of natural time χ, where = Σp(k)f(χ(k)) and p(k) is the normalized energy released during the kth event of which the natural time is defined as χ(k) = k/N and N stands for the total number of ...

It has been an extremely fruitful idea to study a conformal field theory by putting it on various surfaces, with or without boundaries. Apart from the sphere, that has been considered first, prime examples of non–trivial geometries include the torus [1] and the cylinder [2,3]. They serve to probe different facets of a given conformal theory. However the data specific of these surfaces are inext...

We review the current state of knowledge of dynamic critical phenomena in simple magnetic models and present high statistics Monte Carlo data for critical slowing down in Ising and Potts models in two and three dimensions. By fitting the relaxation functions to multi-exponential decays at the critical temperature and applying finite size scaling we are able to extract very accurate estimates fo...

We consider the evolution in full general relativity of a family of linearly unstable isolated spherical neutron stars under the effects of very small perturbations as induced by the truncation error. Using a simple idealfluid equation of state, we find that this system exhibits a type I critical behaviour, thus confirming the conclusions reached by Liebling et al (2010 arXiv:1001.0575v1) for r...

Different perturbation theory treatments of the Ginzburg–Landau phase transition model are discussed. This includes a criticism of the perturbative renormalization group (RG) approach and a proposal of a novel method providing critical exponents consistent with the known exact solutions in two dimensions. The new values of critical exponents are discussed and compared to the results of numerica...

Alignment algorithms are commonly used to detect and quantify similarities between DNA sequences. We study these algorithms in the framework of a recent theory viewing similarity detection as a geometrical critical phenomenon of directed random walks. We show that the roughness of these random walks governs the delity of an alignment, i.e., its ability to capture the correlations between the se...

The statistical mechanics of directed line-like objects, such as directed polymers in an external field, strands of dipoles in both ferroand electrorheological fluids, and flux lines in high-TC superconductors bears a close resemblance to the quantum mechanics of bosons in 2 + 1 dimensions. We show that single component and binary mixture critical phenomena in these systems are in the universal...